Postwar Propaganda: How Many Of Seth Rogen's Ancestor's Were Turned Into Soap?

The Germans were even known to make soap from dead bodies as far back as WW1...

Millions of students all over the world have been told something similar in Holocaust education or in World-War-II history classes, and are still learning it. Independent of its position in the Holocaust discourse, "Professor Spanner's Soap Factory" is deeply rooted in the collective memory of the Polish people. Since 1946/47, nearly every school child in Poland has read Profesor Spanner by Zofia Nafkowska and the references to soap-making from human bodies at Stutt hof inTadeusz Borowski's short stories. Until recently, museums and memorial sites all over Poland exhibited cakes of soap allegedly made by the Germans from their Polish victims. The Danzig soap and Professor Spanner are still used in anti-German polemics, as in the heated debate over a "Center against Expulsions" and its promoter, Erika Steinbach, president of the German Association of Expellees (Bund der Vertriebenen). Stefan Bratkowski, a well-known Polish journalist, wondered in Rzeczpospolita, one of Poland's leading dailies, whether Erika Steinbach's daddy might have guarded transports of Stutthof prisoners on their way to Danzig to be boiled to soap by Professor Spanner, and whether little Erika herself was washed with this soap.

Neander, J. (2006). The Danzig Soap case: Facts and legends around "Professor Spanner" and the Danzig Anatomic Institute 1944-1945. German Studies Review. 29. 63-86. The story of "Professor Spanner's Soap Factory" - The alleged semi-industrial manufacturing of soap from the bodies of concentration camp inmates at the Danzig Anatomic Institute - belongs to the cycle of myths and legends that have grown up around the Holocaust. Its "core of truth" lies in the fact that, in the process of making anatomic preparations, a soapy grease originates as an inevitable by-product, and that this grease was used for cleaning purposes within the institute during the last months of the war. The alleged crime against humanity turns out to have been nothing but a tasteless misdemeanor. Moreover, no Jewish corpses were involved. Reducing the Danzig Soap case, inflated by postwar propaganda to a "prime example of Nazi German crimes," to its real dimensions, does not make the list of the Nazi crimes significantly shorter, but more trustworthy.

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